THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES HONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1921 A HALE OCTOGENARIAN.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18348, 12 September 1921, Page 4

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES HONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1921 A HALE OCTOGENARIAN.

A London physician of some eminence has asserted that a man who looks after himself arid regularly exercises all his faculties should be full of vigorous vitality at eighty. The doctrine certainly finds apt illustration in the case of that shadowy but, in a sense, very real personage, Mr Punch, who recently joined the ranks of the octogenarians. The appearance of his Summer Number happily synchronised with the completion of • the blithe old humorist's eightieth year, and it maybe permissible to imagine the loyal shades of Thackeray and Mark Lemon and Shirley Brooks and Tom Taylor and Leech and Keene and Du Maurier, with a host of other artists and writers dead and gone, clustering round the veteran's "polished poll" and tendering their wistful congratulations. If they peeped over his humped shoulder at the pages of the Summer Number, the pioneer celebrities of the mahogany table would be arrested by the strange differences of the Then and the Now; for the coloured illustrations present a series of vivid contrasts between the modes of the early Victorian era and those of the present time. For instance, we see Miss Priscilla Brown of 1841, lemure and chaperoned, taking a promenade with an eligible young man; while a parallel picture shows her great-grand-daughter going off, tandem-wise on a "mobike," with "anything that blows along." Miss Priscilla "finished the day by stepping a quadrille at the assembly rooms . . . and her great-grand-daughter fox-trots in the hotel lounge." Both modes, are touched with gentle irony—perhaps with a sentimental leaning to the past, bui also with a hint of desideration for some happy and not impossible "via media." Sir Owen Seaman, most indefatigable of topical versifiers, is in his best vein, addressing Mr Punch: Let others mourn their transient Brim© And sigh, «« Horace sighed, "Eheu!" But you—you lightly laugh.at time, and Time, in turn, smiles back at you; Elsewhere his scythe goes -sweeping on, Yet of your vigour takes no toll. Though eighty harvest-moons have shone Down on your polished poll. To-day your ancient spell retrieves The. hour when first you made your bow, And in a coloured texture weaves Comparison of Then and! Now; Showing how Fashion shifts her pose, What mooda and modes she had and has, From modest hoops to flaunting hose, From minuet to jazz. , x •

Eighty years on I like to think That, changeless ’mid the changing scene, Youx powers will yet be in the pink, Your graces in the evergreen; When wo who serve - you now are dead, That you’ll be playing still your-part, Laurels of winter round your head And summer, in your heart. • . The front cover of the Summer Number is, it may be observed, a vivid up-to-date variation of the normal perennial cover designed by “Dicky” Doyle—-that enchanting medley of fantastic conceits, which repays minute and endless inspection and never palls.